A
few days after the Grand Old Tea Party convention in Nashville February 4-6,
Washington Post religion editor David Waters took to the newspaper’s
Under God blog with a post entitled “Will Christian Right join the Tea
Party?”

While noting that the convention featured a fair amount of religious
chatter—invocations and benedictions and the odd workshop on Christian
political engagement—Waters pointed to the absence of religious items on the
Tea Party agenda: nothing about abortion, gay marriage, or the restoration
of God to the public schools. His conclusion: This is “an anti-government
movement, not a pro-God movement” that will make no room for social
conservatives.

My
own sense is that we’re in somewhat deeper, ah, waters.

For
starters, it’s worth asking, “Is there today a Christian Right worthy of the
name capable of joining the party?” Jerry Falwell is dead and Pat Robertson
doesn’t seem to be feeling so good himself—not to mention James Dobson, who
has withdrawn the hem of his garment from Focus on the Family and started up
a new radio show. In a word, there is currently no marquee leader with a
marquee national organization to go where Moral Majority, Christian
Coalition, and Focus went before.

To
the extent that there have been big institutional players in the culture
wars of the Age of Obama, they’ve not been the classic parachurch operations
of yesteryear but traditional religious bodies like the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints leading the charge for Proposition 8 in
California and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops fighting to
keep abortion coverage out of health care reform legislation.

Yes,
Focus anted up big bucks for that Tim Tebow ad during the Superbowl. So
what? Overall, the Christian Right these days looks like a bunch of
has-beens, never-weres, and wannabes.

Some
years ago, George Mason University’s Mark Rozell pointed out in these pages
(“What Christian Right?,” Spring 2003) that wishful journalists have been
writing obituaries for the Christian Right almost since it burst onto the
national scene in 1980. Most recently, the obits have come in the form of
books by the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne (Souled Out: Reclaiming
Faith and Politics after the Religious Right) and Time’s Amy
Sullivan (The Party Faithful: How and Why Democrats Are Closing the God
Gap).

Like
their predecessors, these two 2008 volumes advanced the idea that
conservative religious causes were running out of steam. And, they argued,
the Democratic Party had now found sufficient religion to move the country
past the faith-based politics of the previous generation.

None
of this seems to be the case. Contrary to predictions, the push to establish
gay marriage has hit a wall, and abortion politics remain as grim as ever,
with the tide shifting a bit to the pro-life side. Wars over the teaching of
evolution in the public schools have not ceased, and revisionist views about
the Christian (or “Judeo-Christian”) founding of the nation continue to be
injected into the nation’s textbooks, and consciousness.

That
the Tea Party movement has taken flight on right-wing economic populism
should come as no surprise during the worst recession since World War II.
But that hardly means that the movement is keeping social conservatives off
the reservation.

Ralph Reed, the founding executive director of the Christian Coalition who
has a knack for speaking truths that his opponents dismiss as mere
self-aggrandizement, laid it out in an interview with CBN’s David Brody
February 12. Last summer, Reed established the Faith and Freedom Coalition,
which he described to Brody as “sort of a 21st-century version of the
Christian Coalition on steroids, married with Moveon.orgwith a sprinkling of the NRA.” What it really is, however, is “a
synthesis of the traditional fiscal wing of conservatism and social
conservatives”—in other words, it’s not a Christian Right outfit at all, but
a political action committee designed to merge social conservatives into a
broader conservative movement.

Reed
claims that a lot of Tea Party organizers belong to Faith and Freedom, and
that two of the half-dozen national leaders of the Tea Party Patriots are
old comrades-in-arms. The paradigmatic character in Ben McGrath’s report on
the Tea Party movement in the February 1New Yorker is Don Seely, a social conservative from
Kentucky.

The
fact that the Tea Party movement isn’t trumpeting the old family values
agenda says more about the politics of the moment than the membership. These
are, after all, Sarah Palin’s people. And Bob McDonnell’s. The newly elected
governor of Virginia has impeccable Christian Right credentials—a degree
from Regent University Law School and a perfect record of pushing social
conservatism while representing Virginia Beach in the House of Delegates
from 1993 to 2006. But in 2009, he ran for governor as a fiscal, not a
social, conservative.

Speaking with Brody, Reed allowed as how the Republicans as well as the
Democrats had “lost their way,” and claimed that his new organization would
serve to hold “both political parties accountable.” He also told Brody that
“we got our clocks cleaned on the ground” in the 2008 elections and waxed
enthusiastic about how the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision
in January meant that the organization “can advocate the election or defeat
of candidates.”

Some
Tea Partyers may be resisting a friendly takeover by the GOP but I’d be
willing to bet the house in Maine that come November, counting the number of
Democrats endorsed by the Faith and Freedom Coalition will require the
fingers of one hand. At most.